2009 World Champ says MP4-28 handled best it has all weekend

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Jenson Button underlined the state of McLaren's ongoing struggles by admitting that 11th place on the grid for his home British GP was actually a better result than he had been expecting.

For the second successive race weekend McLaren saw both of their drivers drop out in the second knockout stage of qualifying, something Button had conceded was likely in his interview with Sky Sports News after Friday practice.

However, despite there being no sign of the kind of big step forward the Woking team have been striving for all season, Button, who missed out on knocking Lotus' Kimi Raikkonen out of Q3 by a mere 0.057s, took some solace from the fact that the MP4-28 had felt the best it had all weekend.

"I'm higher than we expected to be I think," the 2009 World Champion told Sky Sports F1.

"This morning and yesterday have been very difficult and we've changed a few things for qualifying and it felt better. It's still not quick - I think we're a second slower than the quick cars, so we gained the half a second that we hoped to.

"We're never happy to be P11 but to be fair if we'd qualified in the top ten we would have qualified tenth anyway [once they were there], I don't think we would have gone out [to set a lap]."

Button's position at the head of the sixth row means he is the first driver in the field with a free choice of starting tyres for Sunday's race and he expressed hope that he could deliver a more memorable result in front of the home fans.

"It's probably actually better to be 11th on the grid; it's on the clean side and we will see what we can do tomorrow," he added.

"I'm much happier in the qualifying that I've been the whole of the weekend so we should be positive that we've improved the car this weekend and you never know tomorrow what can happen."

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